by Patricia Churchland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2013
Wide-ranging, insightful and provocative—a book to savor.
Churchland (Emeritus, Philosophy/Univ. of California, San Diego; Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, 2011, etc.) probes the interface between our perception of our own mental processes and our growing knowledge of how our brains function.
The author is sharply critical of those who make claims that “free choice is an illusion” and “the self is an illusion,” the kind of hype she dismisses as self-promoting “[n]eurojunk…over-egged ideas about the brain [that] turn out to rest on modest, ambiguous, and hard-to interpret data.” She also dismisses mind-body dualism. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship as co-founder of the field of neurophilosophy, the author weaves together the teachings of philosophers (Aristotle, Plato, Descartes) and scientists (Galvani, Darwin and Helmholtz) to grapple with the problem. She incorporates illustrative anecdotes from her childhood in a small farming community to support her contention that accepting the nonexistence of a spiritual realm separate from the natural world need not diminish spirituality. Recognizing that mental life, spiritual values, joys and sorrows emerge from the functioning of our brains in no way diminishes their reality. Churchland also speculates on the evolutionary leap in the mental life of mammals, which nurture their newborns, and the mental acuity demanded of predators and their prey in the struggle to survive. Reprising the latest advances in neuropsychology, she explains how brain circuitry is organized to model the world (internally and externally) in a series of maps. Going back to Freud's earliest research in neurology, which led him to recognize the existence of unconscious mental functions, Churchland probes the difference between habits and reflexes and between consciousness and semiconscious states such as sleep and coma.
Wide-ranging, insightful and provocative—a book to savor.Pub Date: July 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-05832-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Share your opinion of this book
More by Patricia Churchland
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PROFILES
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Share your opinion of this book
More by Albert Camus
BOOK REVIEW
by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
BOOK REVIEW
by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
BOOK REVIEW
by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by Stephen Batchelor
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.